Emergency Medicine: Open Access
Open Access

Abstract

Facial Pain: Evaluation and Treatment in the Emergency Room

William Mullally and Kathryn Hall

Facial pain and headache are common complaints of patients presenting to a hospital emergency room and clinicians, in general, are more comfortable evaluating and treating the primary and secondary headache syndromes. The evaluation of facial pain, however, provides more of a challenge, as medical personnel are often not as well versed in the differential diagnosis of the disorders that are the source of the discomfort. Our goal in this paper is to provide an easy framework for the acute evaluation and treatment of patients presenting to the emergency room with facial pain that is not the result of a primary headache disorder.